


Morning

by Awesomeist0



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: But this was in the past and not the focus of the story, Cuddling & Snuggling, Don't be scared by the character death tag, Hurt/Comfort, Lots of face touching, M/M, Minor Kylo Ren/Rey, Most likely out of character but I wanted to write something fluffy, Soulmates, seriously so many cuddles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 02:02:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10233182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Awesomeist0/pseuds/Awesomeist0
Summary: At 65, Ben Solo dies of a heart attack, leaving behind a wife and daughter.  He doesn't expect to wake up again a young man, and certainly not in bed with his former lover.A man who was publicly executed by the Republic thirty years earlier.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Based off of this writing prompt from Reddit:
> 
> “You and your spouse of 30 years are in a fatal car accident. When you get to heaven, you find out that you get to spend eternity with your soulmate. You realize a problem when you wake up next to a total stranger.”
> 
> So okay, I made some big changes since...you know, it’s the Star Wars universe and there aren’t cars. And Kylo Ren doesn’t end up waking up next to a stranger, but a figment from his past. As a side note I don’t ship Kylo Ren/Rey, so their interactions are limited to the past and not the focus of the story. Don’t look for any deep meaning in this, since this fic is 99.999% self indulgent fluff. And face touches. Me likey face touches.

 

This was not how Ben Solo expected to die.

He’d long since missed his chance to go out in battle in a blaze of Force-filled glory, but surely there was something else memorable waiting for him.  A pod racing accident, not that he would admit to being into that sort of thing.  Or maybe one of those antique speeders he spent his time restoring would actually blow up in his face, the way Rey constantly warned that they would.  

_ “But what do I know, Solo? I’m just the best damn mechanic ever to pick up a hydrospanner.” _

But  _ this _ .  A heart attack in bed at the age of 65.  It was…

Expected.  Ordinary.  Something he’d spent his life trying to prove that he wasn’t.

He’d opened his eyes again, certainly not something he ever thought would happen after dying.  And he found himself in bed, sunlight streaming in and catching in the white cotton sheets.  Ben shook his head to clear it, and only then noticed his hands.  

He was young again.

Gone were the wrinkles and scars he’d accumulated from years of fighting and just existing.  His skin was pale and smooth, broken only by the dark moles he despised.  Transfixed, Ben reached up to touch his own face, finding no trace of the scar he’d had for so very long.  When he felt brave and silly, he’d joke with Rey that it was a reminder of their first fight.  She never found it funny.

There was someone in bed beside him; something that was certainly not a surprise after being married for thirty years.  But  _ here _ , in this odd little universe outside of time, it made no sense.  Rey couldn’t be with him here...wherever here happened to be.  His bedmate was tightly cocooned in the white sheets, making it almost impossible to determine anything about them.  Just the rise and fall of a chest; the deep breathing of a sound sleep.  The ends of copper hair, looking like molten gold against the colorless bedding.

Copper hair?

Ben felt an unknown hand reach into his chest and squeeze hard.  It wasn’t.  It couldn’t be.

“Hux?!”

A name that fell too easily from his lips after decades of being unspoken.  Unspoken, but not forgotten, by any means.  Something he thought of late at night, when the moonlight seared away the protective barrier he constructed around himself made of too soft, too small hands, and a body with curves and softness.  When he found the desire for ice and hard muscle almost too much to bear, and he had to rush away to stroke himself off.  Rey...how he loved Rey, but she couldn’t understand.  And even if she could, she still couldn’t be everything he needed.

Icy blue eyes snapped open, fixed on his own with a naked vulnerability that terrified him.  “Ren,” he breathed.

Ren.  Kylo Ren.  A name that had died along with the First Order.  Not a name, more like an incantation created to summon ghosts from the past.  He shuddered, feeling like he was standing on someone’s grave.  “N-no.  Not anymore.”  His words were too broken, almost feeling as though they were slicing at his throat on the way out like shards of glass.  He wasn’t Kylo Ren; he couldn’t be.  Because that would mean becoming everything he now despised.  Everything he currently fought against.  He was Ben Solo; he’d always been Ben Solo.  His mother said that Snoke had twisted his mind to make him forget, but he was always there, along with the light that he fought so hard to extinguish.

He couldn’t be Kylo Ren again.

“Ah.  I suppose that means that Supreme Leader’s gag order on speaking your birth name has been lifted.”  Hux’s tone was mocking, and closer to the way he’d remembered.  “It took you long enough to get here.”

Ben was suddenly torn between demanding an explanation for where  _ here _ was, and apologizing to Hux for making him wait.  

So he chose to do neither.

He wanted to run.  Run as far and fast as he could away from the literal ghost of his past and back to the life he’d grown accustomed to.  But he too was dead, and where could he go?  _ “You can’t outrun death, kid,” _ his father was fond of saying, not that Han didn’t try his best to attempt it.  Up until the literal moment of his demise, but he couldn’t think of it.  Not without screaming.  

He’d dreamed of  _ this _ moment for so long.  Played it out over and over; held onto it when life got overwhelming.  But now that Hux was here...flesh and warm and so close to his arms...Ben felt so lost.  He felt his mouth open and close ineffectively, tongue swollen with all the things he needed so badly to say.

Things that Hux seemed to already know.

“I just don’t understand,” he whispered; the words sticking in his mouth and cutting off his air.  Was he breathing? Did the dead breathe? Such a stupid thing to be thinking of now, but something he grasped at clumsily, hoping to make any logic out of such an illogical situation.  “Where am I...How did I…?”

Hux shook his head sadly.  “And you know nothing.  Fantastic.”  He raked a pale hand through his hair, the golden strands unruly and so kissable.  “You know you’re dead.  Right?”

Ben could only nod, uncertain of how to craft the words to formulate the response to such a blunt question.

“Well that’s a start.  And of course, you know that  _ I’m _ dead.”  He smiled wryly, as such a thing could be funny and not the singular event that almost destroyed Ben’s life.  

“Then...what are we?” 

“Dead.”  Hux’s answer was so simple, making him feel foolish for even mentioning it.  “We’re dead, Ben.  Kriff, I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to calling you that.”

He stared down at the bedspread, feeling a tear trickle down the side of his nose.  He didn’t know what he was feeling now.  There was just too much of it; good and bad and unknown all knotted together like those coils of electric lights his parents pulled out of the attic every Life Day.  Being back with Hux was like a dream he was afraid to have.  Not because it was frightening, but it just felt too good and too real that the fracturing kiss of morning would shatter his already broken heart, just a bit more.  And thinking of that brought the guilt; guilt that his thirty years with Rey and eventually their daughter hadn’t been enough.  

He didn’t  _ want _ it to be enough.

Hux had burned into his life and skin, and all of his wife’s cool acceptance and companionship couldn’t soothe him.

“I never stopped loving you,” Ben muttered; words garbled and almost inaudible from the effort it took to hold back his tears.  

“I know.”  Icy words, seemingly as cool as the eyes of the man who spoke them.  But instead of coldness, he felt a tenderness that warmed him, body and soul.  Broken body and fractured soul, both breaking more and mending with each moment he spent beside Hux.  With each of the sweet breaths he felt against his bare skin.  “I’m not angry at you.”  Ben felt the sob he fought so hard to contain rip from deep within him at the sensation of the other man’s hand against his cheek.  He drew a shuddering breath, lost in the sensation of Hux brushing away his tears with the pad of his thumb.  “I wanted you to keep living.  And since I couldn’t be with you, I’m glad you found someone who could.”

The tears began to flow faster as Ben fumbled back for his years of Jedi training, hoping to find something deep within to keep his rapidly spiraling emotions at bay.  “I needed you,” he sobbed, cheeks flaming in shame as he felt himself slowly become unglued .

“If it were up to me, I never would have left you.”  Hux touched him so much more gently than he deserved, skimming his fingertips up and down his cheek.  “You know, I don't think I've ever felt your skin without that damned scar.”

Ben chuckled, or at least attempted to, but it came out wrong.  Harsh and aggressive, and he flinched at the sound of it.  He smashed his face against Hux’s chest, trying to lose himself in the scent and touch and heartbeat of the man he loved.  

He wouldn't have survived without Rey.  He knew it.  She was the only one to stand by him after he turned his back on the Order, pledging his saber and all that remained within him to his mother and the Republic.  She was the only one who cared that he was breaking; increasingly lost to the nightmares and ghosts of the past.

She was the only one to stand beside him as his lover was executed in front of the entire galaxy.

Ben clutched Hux closer, not sure if the sound he was hearing was his love’s actual heart, or just the sweet sound echoing across his memories.  “Don't ever leave me again.”  Whether this demand was even possible didn't matter.  He needed to hear the words spoken aloud so they could reverberate forever in the universe.

“Nine hells, Ben.  We're apart for thirty years, and you get maudlin.”  He felt Hux tangle his fingers through his hair, firmly but still so gently holding him in place.  Ben nuzzled against his lover’s

_ //please by my lover, oh please please// _

neck, feeling little tingles race through him as Hux continued stroking his cheek.  “And anyway, forever’s a very long time when there's nothing else for you.  What happens in a few years when your wife dies?” Ben felt the pain twitch through Hux like an electric current upon speaking the word “wife.” 

What would happen?

Rey was precious to him.  That would not change.  She was the mother of his child, and they’d spent so much time and had gone through so much together.  But even so, there was a dark shadow that lingered across their quiet moments, when everything should have been bright and pure.  He certainly didn’t doubt her love for him, but he knew that Rey had her own specter of a past relationship that clung to her like a second skin.  

So they both tried to make it disappear.  And in their thirty years together, it was never vocalized, When he found himself flung from an uneasy sleep to find her curled in on herself and weeping, he never begrudged her for having another man’s name on her lips.  In the very nexus of their passion, when the need to feel the kind touch of another became too pressing to ignore, he tried not to hear the same name exhaled like a breathless prayer.  Sacred and precious and something that he could never be to her, even if they remained together until the end of time.

“Finn,” he muttered, his mind drifting back to a man with an easy smile and sad eyes.  So jovial and easygoing; the son he knew his father always wanted but never got.

“What?”

“She loved me.  I know she did.  But she loved him more.”   His lips were pressed together tightly; a shaking line of pale tension as he tried to hold back his soul.  “And I’m okay with that.”  

Hux’s eyes were so blue.  Endlessly blue, like the clear water he saw at his mother’s estate on Naboo.  He was drowning, drowning, but it was so sweet.  So warm, so comforting, like the strong arms and the solid chest of the man he made a silent vow to love and cherish, even as he spoke the words aloud to another.  “Sweet boy,” he muttered, fingertips brushing lazy circles against his scalp.  “I would have waited ten lifetimes for you, but I think thirty years was quite enough, huh?”

There was more that could have been said.  More sweet nothings.  More assurances that the love they both claimed to share was real, and more words that wove a tapestry of a possible forever that may never come to pass.  It wasn’t what he needed to say, or anything Hux needed to hear.

So Ben kissed him instead.  

Lightly at first, just the barest brush of skin against skin.  A painfully slow reacquainting of their bodies, but one that he hoped would never end.  Their lips joined and released, over and over, and it almost felt like Hux was draining away some of the darkness that poisoned him.  Even after all this time apart, he’d never forgotten the taste of his love’s mouth.  The way their bodies fit so perfectly together; his own so big and coarse, and Hux’s lithe and sleek.  

And in the lazy morning hours, they became one.


End file.
